Everything has order.

Life itself, is a cycle, in which each cycle is separated by time, and defined by its inflection points. This is the spiral. There is one, which through historical inflection points gathers an increasing amount of complexity, beginning at the origin of life. Prokaryotes to eukaryotes. Colonial organisms to multicellular organisms. Generalized blobs to specialized organs. Neural nets to brains.

When the first organism in the spiral that could reason about itself come about, and that organism built civilization, the complexity and order grew from the space of the biological into the space of reason, and the process repeated itself. Multicellular organisms began to collect themselves into colonial groups. The groups became organized nations. Nations of generalized farmers slowly became nations of specialized laborers, organized into silos of many shapes and sizes depending on that nation's needs.

Eventually, fossil fuel was discovered, and this whole process exploded and boomed in ways and means that were never before possible. Pointed ideological, technological, and biological inflections have been raised again and again and again.

The seeming inevitability of this pattern for the first world nations is dwindling individual autonomy, as each individual is forced into further and further specialized roles to satisfy the needs of the super-organism, in an environment inhuman: a complete panopticon, with a violent immune system and AI to keep "cells" in check, each doing specific tasks with no awareness or capability to comprehend the whole, ordered by an autonomic centralized bureaucracy. Many kinds of super-organizations will completely atrophy in favor of a singular kind which an individual will devote his full time to serving. The super-organism, at this point, appears to be a dismal welding of monopolistic corporations and state.

The rest of the world will either perish, or be relegated to small niches and wastelands which the super-organism cannot be reasonably expected to function. Life will not be necessarily bad here, but it will neither be as comfortable as today nor as "safe and secure" as life as a mindless slave in the super organism (provided you do not observe traits which are perceived of as dangerous by the super-organisms immune system).

Anti-Spiral

Certain aspects of life run directly to counteract the building of greater orders. Viruses hijack and sabotage genetic machinery. Bacteria infiltrate, eat at, and poison, larger organisms. Anti-clerics seek to sunder the higher orders of churches and anarchists seek to undo corrupt orders of economic and political crystallization.

Anti-spirals can create untold amounts of damage, and can flip entire orders, but they ultimately never destroy the spiral. The pockets of alternative orders they create are temporary, and are ultimately destroyed themselves, with small seeds of their ideas becoming absorbed into the main spiral. While we are seemingly meant to revile anti-spirals - because we all implicitly wish that we were part of the main spiral - they are absolutely necessary to the fitness and health of the whole super-organism.

A critical issue which the spiral faces is that once it succeeds it cannot change itself very easily. Pieces of machinery that are ancient become unquestionable and fundamental, and to destroy them completely is to end the spiral entirely. Such a baked fundamental defect can never truly be removed, and instead damage can only be mitigated through trial with anti-spirals. A cancer, for instance, is such a fundamental defect; without completely changing genetic the storage mechanism and machinery you will never be able to stop it from manifesting on a biological organism. In society, we could consider the ur-ideology - that ideology that permeates our culture so deeply that it is difficult to necessarily even question the central premises - to be similar to fundamental biological machinery, and similarly, it mutates with ad-hoc additions and can slowly become broken and develop a memetic sort of cancer that threatens to undo the progress of the whole. These pieces typically manifest as articles of irrational faith: perhaps at one point meaningful for reasons beyond its face-value text, but with the changes of the times have been warped to a point that the points that they make are no longer relevant. They are things utterly unquestionable by their followers, driving men into a firey anger at mere question that the fundamental tenets might be wrong. They can be political ideologies, religious texts, and even scientific threads long left behind that are gripped in desperation or comfort.

The Power of the Greater Anti-Spiral

We are nearing possibly the greatest inflection point that could ever exist: one which would allow people to tear down absolutely everything that was ever known, and start anew with something different: ideologically, biologically, technologically. We can in essence explore paths greater than our current spiral without being locked down to the choices of the distant past. In many places, we have already surpassed the capabilities of nature through technologies, and with careful thought and design, we can correct the trajectories of our current economic and political order. Things which previously weighed down the spiral and gave way to defects and inefficiencies could be fully and completely shed (perhaps creating new compromises and defects, of course, that might later be discovered and accounted for).

The aspects of centralization may in some sense be impossible to arrest; some piece will ultimately centralize, and become the dominant form of order. It will not resemble something we necessarily are completely comfortable with; there will be trade offs. However, we can choose whether or not this will be an utterly repugnant, dystopian techno-fascist process or one which results in a comfortable, equitable, ecological merge of man with his technology into something greater.